The general showed me around his shop, the Alice Lakwena Good Buy. Alice Lakwena was the general’s patron saint, a visionary who’d convinced her followers they were impervious to bullets. In the 1980s, thousands died believing her—and not just the first hundred who so obviously died from bullets, but those after, row upon row, year upon year, convinced that their fate would be different. Such is the human capacity for wishful thinking.
“And here are the washing powders.” Christmas gestured to a surprisingly wide array, including imported French brands that must have come from Kinshasa. “And here, cocking oil.”
I smiled to myself, the naughty joke at his expense. Cocking oil. It almost made him comic; I almost said, “And what do you cock with your cocking oil?” But he would recognize my sarcasm immediately. So I nodded, and he showed me the flip-flops he imported from India. “They are very nice colors and of superior manufacture.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a girl, perhaps 15, diligently wiping down each can of tomatoes and replacing it with excruciating exactitude. She leaned into the shelves, so close I wondered if she had poor sight, and positioned the can, adjusting it several times. Her efforts were in vain, for Christmas tutted, pushed her aside, fine-tuned the placement by half a millimeter.
“A hair’s breadth,” he chuckled. “When I first heard the expression, I thought it was a hare’s breath—you know, the distance of the breath of a rabbit. Poff.” He blew. “Not far!”
“Yes,” I replied. “That makes a certain sense.”
“How about a refreshment?” He turned to me, his generous smile. “We can go to my guest house.”
We walked together across the sunny, open courtyard to the Sleep EZ. It was, like the shop, fastidious. I wondered how he dealt with blood and excrement, the mess of slaughter. We sat in large, over-padded chairs upholstered in purple ripple velvet. Another girl, the same age as the last, silently placed a tray of tea and coffee on the table. Under the cups, jug of milk, sugar bowl, and thermoses, was an immaculate ironed linen cloth embroidered with primroses.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Tea,” I said.
“I shall be mother,” he tittered. Where had he learned this? The missionary school in Kitgum? A colonial memsahib, perhaps, tucked into the mountains of South Sudan, like a Japanese soldier who didn’t realize the war had ended long ago. Is that where he got the tea service?
“You are not afraid?” He handed me the tea.
“Of what?”
He gestured to my belly.
Casually, I moved my hands to cover it, something we both knew to be instinctive and pointless. My belly, like a ripe peach for Christmas and his elves to split open and remove the pit. They had proved adept at this—I had read the Human Rights Watch reports, I had even seen the photograph of a woman who’d survived.
As a pregnant woman, I discovered I was paradoxically more inviolable and more vulnerable; I was large and slow-moving, my swollen belly almost a deformity, yet I was an object of atavistic respect. I was doing my part for the species.
I raised my eyebrow to General Christmas: “Should I be afraid?”
He laughed, his warm chuckle, as if we were two old friends sharing a joke. How many psychopaths does it take to change a lightbulb? It depends who the lightbulb is attached to. Oh, ho ho, ho, that is so funny. “Ah, Kay, are you referring to certain reports? These are mere propaganda.”
“The incidents certainly happened, General. Maybe you don’t accept that your men were involved.”
He was still smiling and expansive. “You are trying to be clever with your words, ‘you don’t accept.’ I do not accept because my men would never do such things. These are our people, all of them. Why don’t you ask Foranga or SPLIF? They are interlopers, not from this region.”
Foranga, SPLIF—part of the myriad of militias operating in the nasty triangle of death between northern Uganda, South Sudan and eastern Congo: Hutu, Tutsi, FNP, PPT, WTF. They all had acronyms, their clubhouses, their uniforms, their a la carte vengeance, their vague mission statements invoking “people” and/or “freedom.”
Now I ran my hand over my belly, almost provocative. “I wonder what it feels like for a man to do such a thing. Does it make him less of a man or more of one, that you are not afraid of committing the worst crime.” I looked at Christmas now: “It seems almost brave because it is such a terrible, terrible thing to do.”
He held my gaze. He knew my trick. I watched his liquid dark pupils and thought about what they had recorded, how the neurons in his brains stored the images as memories. Whatever he had done he may deny or excuse, but he wouldn’t forget.
“Anyway, Kay.” He liked to use my name. “I was speaking of your advanced state of pregnancy and you are here in this country where—thanks to Mr. Foranga and his greed—we have inadequate medical care. I am surprised your husband allows you to travel.”
“Did you know at least one baby was full term, it—he—was born alive and your soldiers—”
“Foranga’s soldiers, Kay.”
“We disagree then.”
He splayed his hands, a gesture of reason. “I am simply expressing concern. My own wife lost a child. If you should need my assistance, please do not hesitate. My resources are at your disposal.”
“I will be returning to Juba tomorrow. Thank you for the offer, though.” I gave him an obligatory smile, then took up my notebook. “You wanted to speak with me. What do you want to say?”
He lobbed back his own smile. We were smiling at each other. “I am very surprised, Kay. For years you have been trying to meet with me. I thought you had the questions.”
So he wanted to be flattered; he had in his mind an interview not a monologue. He appreciated the difference between conversation and rhetoric. He wanted to appear reasonable. But why now—what was his motive?
I could ask him about his civic vision for peacetime, or about his past—had he tortured kittens as a child, had his mother shamed him while toilet-training? I could ask him about his influences—Marx, Castro, Donald Trump? What music he listened to, books he read, movies he watched; did he prefer Coke or Pepsi? But I had only one question—there was only one. I’d been asking it for years, drilling down into the African soil. I leaned forward, aware that he could glimpse my cleavage. “How did it begin for you?”
He frowned. “It?”
It has so many names. The names all have their roots, their reasons—their pathologies, physiologies, psychologies. But in the end, there’s only the single, singular noun.
“Evil,” I said.
“Evil.” He mulled the word, rolled it around on his tongue like a boiled sweet. “Kay, we are fighting for freedom.”
“Yes, yes, of course. But I’m not interested in that. I want to know when you first felt evil.”
Leaning back, he began to drum his fingers on the arm rest. At last he gave me a grin. “You speak as if it is a feeling, like happiness or coldness. That you can define from one moment to the next.”
“Is it?”
“And you speak as if you have never felt it.”
“I’ve never killed anybody, General.”
“And that is the defining act of evil—the, what do you call it, hallmark?”
“Is it?”
“Killing.” He sighed: oh, the grating ennui of waging civil war. “Is easy, it is the easiest thing. We are designed to kill. Killing is our history, our design. It is our hands, our brains.”
“So is art, so is medicine.”
“Really? You think there is good and evil, salt and pepper?”
“Not so simply delineated, of course not. But at a certain point relativism becomes an excuse for atrocity. I’m interested in that point.”
“So you’re not here to write about me?”
“I’ll write something, the usual thing.”
“You are here to examine me, then, like an ape in a cage. The big black man all you whites fear.”
“No. Not that.”
“But it’s a story you like to tell yourselves.”
“It’s passé.”
“So you think there is a door that you open, you step through, and you are evil?” he pondered. “Or do you think it is a corridor, long or short, moving from light to dark?”
“I want to know what it is for you.”
“Why, Kay?”
I shrugged. “I want to understand why terrible things happen.”
“Understand? You sound like a dilettante. One of your white tribesman drinking martinis, shooting elephants. ‘Bring me more ice, boy.’”
“Forget that I’m white and you’re black.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Then it’s beside the point. Race has nothing to do with evil.”
“To answer your question, I have to admit that I’m evil.”
“But you are.” I smiled.
“You think there’s you and there’s me, there’s what you do and there’s what I do.”
“You want me to say there isn’t? That given a set of circumstances I could round up a group of school children and burn them to death in a church. I don’t believe I could ever do that.”
“I’m disappointed in your lack of imagination, Kay. You want to understand? Then imagine. You are in a different world to my world, Kay, a gated community, a real passport. You don’t know, you haven’t the faintest idea what you would do in my situation. Your innocence is just a failure of imagination.”
“Others in your exact same circumstances don’t—”
He cut me off, his hand coming off the armrest like a knife. “Where I am, who I am. Here, now, the accumulation of what I have done and what has been done to me. I cannot be anyone else.”
“You could meet with the opposition. You could sign a truce with Museveni. He’d give you amnesty.”
“He’d give me amnesty with the crocodiles in Lake Victoria. You know that.”
“You keep killing, then, to avoid dying yourself.”
“Because we are in a war, Kay.”
“That you perpetuate.”
“That would perpetuate itself. As long as there are people, there will be war. This is basic.” He shook his head. He was getting bored.
“What is it, then, that you want to tell me? Because you did bring me here. Not just to repay me for my efforts. Tell me, tell me.”
We were back again to his expansive smile. “Okay. I admit. I heard you were pregnant. I wondered to myself, this white woman, how white people think they are special, will she come all this way to see a man who cuts babies out of the belly?”
I held his gaze, impassive. “I am a trophy?”
“Not yet.”
*
Back at the Hotel Gol, I poured myself a small beer and reviewed the HRW files, the many eye witnesses that corroborated accusations against Christmas and his elves. Foranga was just as bad: a five-year-old girl raped so violently and repeatedly that her pelvis had been broken and she now walked like a dog.
I finished my beer and took a bath. I was almost too large for the tiny hotel tub, which anyway filled only halfway before the water ceased. I washed, I could barely reach my toes. I was much bigger with Tom than I’d been with Freya.
Rising from the tub in the Hotel Gol, my vast, heavy belly like a masthead, I thought about hell. I am an atheist, but allow for the infinite universe—possibilities quite beyond our simple sketch of God or time: some massing or conglomerating or dispersing of matter, the pliability of dimensions. Why not?
Explain evil. This is always the problem for theists. So they invent Satan, and Satan and God become puppet-masters. We humans, flippy, floppy, string-tied, we cannot help ourselves. General Christmas, therefore, cannot be blamed. But I don’t believe that. Cannot believe it. And yet if you bring in free will, then what’s the point of God—other than as an arbiter of culturally relative morality. He sends you to Heaven or Hell.
Once, in rural Nigeria, Michael and I had witnessed a traditional dance involving full body masks. The dancers came out, the central dancer wearing an eland mask made elaborately of grass. The dancer was completely encased in the mask—only his feet were visible, scuffing the dust. The eland strode and shied, bucked and turned, elusive, all power and elegance. I had mistakenly thought the point for the dancer was to become the eland, to take on its qualities—as with warriors who used to eat the heart and brains of their vanquished foes. But Michael told me it was more beautiful: wearing the mask, the dancer ceased to be a dancer—he shed his human skin—and leaving his human-ness was able to enter the plain of pure being where all living things existed as spirits. All were equal on this spirit plain: there was no rank and file, no leaders, no predators nor prey, no ego, no desire.
And what if we somehow might transcend to that other plain, stripped of our physical encasement, human or animal, some High Catholic idea of Holy Spirit—ego dispersed, and all of us become all evil and all good, undifferentiated, the molecules blending. And in this way I might finally understand General Christmas, I might be him, and he me. Not nirvana, not some painted-up sop to the lonely and the bigoted and the suffering, but a complete neutrality of being, like the atoms in an acorn or a stone.
The water was cold in the bath. I had not realized the passage of time. Time felt like a tunnel that I could look through and move through, from the first glimmer of human consciousness a million years ago to my own present—my own miraculous hand against the white porcelain of the bathtub. It was the same tunnel for all of us, the same way back, the way down, and we were running with fear, trying to escape ourselves, the cages that we build; sometimes we were putting on masks and dancing, sometimes we were raping and plunging ourselves into the bodies of others, all of this a frantic attempt to escape: to shed our wretched selves.
While I was convulsed with thought—so self-important, so proud of my existential adventures, my bravery, my steadfastness under Santa’s scrutiny—my body, my mortal body, the manufacture of millions of years, was betraying me. I stood up and felt dizzy, saw myself briefly in the cracked mirror across from the bath, hideous and bloated, and I saw myself fall, heard a sound like firecrackers which I later understood to be my head smacking against the wall and the side of the tub on the way down. Because the tub was only half-full I did not drown.